Stochastic Hex Anti-Tiling : Terrain & Mesh provides a high-performance, production-ready solution to repetitive texture tiling in Unity 6 URP. Grounded in Morten S. Mikkelsen’s peer-reviewed JCGT 2022 research (Practical Real-Time Hexagonal Grid Stochastic Texture Synthesis), this package replaces conventional anti-tiling techniques like smudgy noise overlays, heavy Look-Up Tables (LUTs), and 4-tap square grids etc—with a pure ALU math engine (HexHash2D). By skewing UV space into a hexagonal lattice with randomized cell rotations and barycentric weight blending, it completely eliminates macro-grid repetition and cross-hatching artifacts while preserving the sharp structural details of organic textures like rock, grass, sand, and bark in just a single click.
Key Features:
- Zero-VRAM ALU Engine: Replaces memory-heavy LUT maps, pre-baked atlases, and noise overlays with fast GPU math, maintaining a zero-VRAM footprint on standard PBR materials.
- 3-Tap Lattice Efficiency: Evaluates a 3-tap triangular grid—the practical bare minimum setup required for continuous 2D planar blending—saving 25% GPU texture sampler cycles compared to 4-tap square grid stochastic methods.
- Structure-Preserving Weight Exponentiation: Unlike smudgy noise overlays or Voronoi blending that blur surface features, contrast exponentiation applied to barycentric weights preserves crisp, organic texture details without histogram transformations.
- Tangent-Space Normal Alignment: Dynamically rotates normal map vector channels (n.xy = mul(rot, n.xy)) alongside UV coordinates, guaranteeing physically accurate specular highlights and lighting reflections.
- Seam-Free Mipmapping: Evaluates screen-space derivatives (ddx/ddy) prior to UV rotation and samples via SAMPLE_TEXTURE2D_GRAD, eliminating edge seams and pitch-black mipmap glitches.
Seamless Workflow & Integration
- 3D Meshes: Assign the Shader Graph or SubGraph to your material and toggle Enable Anti-Tiling for instant setup on props and environments.
- Unity Terrains: Replaces default Terrain Lit shaders with seamless 4-layer splatmap support, automatically synchronizing Layer Tiling, Offset, Normal Scale, Metallic, Smoothness, Color Tint, and AO Remapping directly from the native Terrain Inspector.
